Omen IV: The Awakening...dumb TV movie kills viewers' brain cells

To: Mace Neufeld, Harvey Bernhard, Robert J. Anderson and Brian Taggert
From: Perplexed Film Viewer
Re: Omen IV: The Awakening

Gentlemen,

As someone who has been watching and reviewing movies for a very long time, I am well aware of the film industry's true nature, i.e., that film studios and television networks' main focus is to make money for their corporate owners' stockholders - any real entertainment value of the projects that get "green-lit" is purely incidental.

Because most businesspeople tend to be very conservative and risk-adverse, it's therefore not surprising that studios and producers are attracted to sequels, prequels and franchises, even when a film - such as The Omen ­ is intended to be a stand-alone viewing experience and isn't - like the first two Superman movies - part of an organic multi-episode series.

Franchises, when they succeed, often result in big payoffs for everyone involved in their creation; George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, and even Misters Neufeld and Bernhard know this because they've been involved with quite a few successful film series, including - in the case of producers Neufeld and Bernhard - both the Jack Ryan andThe Omen movies,

However, as you gentlemen are no doubt aware, more often than not, franchises quite often take wrong turns when producers make ill-considered decisions based primarily on milking more money out of their cash cow and not on whether they are making something an audience really wants to see in theaters or on TV.

Such is the case with your dreadful made-for-broadcast TV movie Omen IV: The Awakening, which aired on the then still-relatively-new Fox network a decade after the theatrical run of the less-than-impressive The Final Conflict: Omen III.

As someone who enjoyed the first two Damien Thorn-is-the-Antichrist movies and barely tolerated the third, my question to you guys is this: What in the Devil were you thinking when you accepted Fox's commission for a fourth installment of a supposedly completed series?

Oh, yeah. You were thinking: If this movie has supernaturally great ratings, we'll all profit from this, especially when it is rebroadcast and goes to home video.

Now, while I realize that even the most successful producers and screenwriters sometimes create, well, crappy projects along with really good ones, I am really perplexed - as are many of my fellow reviewers - by the high levels of silliness and low levels of quality in this, Mr. Bernhard's final project as a producer.

Omen IV: The Awakening

Apparently, this piece of cinematic dross exists because 20th Century Fox wanted to "feed" the fledgling Fox network with a series of "From Big Screen to the TV Screen" projects to give its TV subdivision a lot of the studio's copyrighted content and incidentally make more money if the various projects were as successful as the 1972-1983 situation comedy M*A*S*H, which itself had been derived from Robert Altman's hit 1970 film.

And because The Omen trilogy had been one of the studio's biggest non-Star Wars franchises, the suits in Burbank, California figured that the Antichrist-on-Earth series could continue as a multi-TV movie franchise.

Unfortunately, 1991's Omen IV: The Awakening is so badly-written, ineptly directed and acted so insipidly that very few of the movie trilogy's fans (and there are many of those) could stomach it.


The basic plot of Omen IV follows the barebones blueprint of the original movies: a couple of attractive and successful attorneys named Karen (Faye Grant) and Gene York (Michael Woods) adopt Delia (Asia Vieira), a young girl of mysterious origins from a group of Catholic nuns because they are having trouble conceiving a child of their own.

As in The Omen, the Yorks have the same experience as the ill-fated Thorn family did; the kid is cute and on the surface very normal.  Or, rather, as normal as six- or seven-year-old girls with dark personalities and immunity to all diseases can be. 

But things take a very dark turn when Delia's very psychic nanny Jo (Anne Hearn) starts getting bad feelings about her young charge.  Her misgivings spark a Need to Know More That Won't Go Away, so Jo takes Delia to a sort of Psychic Fair where spiritually-attuned individuals delve into all sorts of psych activities, including aura-capturing photography.

At this fair, Jo's photographer friend Noah (Jim Byrnes) snaps some of these "psychic aura" pictures of Delia.  Predictably, they confirm Jo's fears that the little imp is, indeed, more than a kid with a bad temper...considerably more.

As in the first Omen movie, REALLY BAD THINGS start happening to people who start poking their noses into Delia's mysterious origins.  Strange accidents and murders - Jo is dispatched by a sinister-looking Rottweiler (a nod to the first film, obviously) when she uncovers what the audience already knows: Delia is the daughter of the late Damien Thorn, a.k.a. Satan Junior.

In another nod to The Omen, Gene York, Delia's adopted father, is seriously considering a run for the Presidency of the United States.  This, of course, is the perfect position for Satan's grandchild to be in, since the Antichrist is supposed to be a person close to the centers of power and finance.  Thus, Delia's main job is to help make sure this comes about No Matter What.

Meanwhile, Karen is being given information that Delia is not exactly a normal kid, and as the movie progresses, she starts following the same psychological/action must be taken path taken by Robert Thorn in the vastly superior 1976 original film.  Now, the only question is: will Karen avoid Ambassador Thorn's ultimate fate?

Perplexed Reviewer's Thoughts:
 
Gentlemen, I have already said that I understand the business reasons of why you made this totally unnecessary straight-to-TV piece of, um, garbage.  No need to rehash the whole we thought it would become a TV cash cow rationalizations.

What perplexes the daylights out of me - and countless others, I'm sure - is why you guys, especially Misters Bernhard and Taggert, would write a teleplay that manages to be both a horrible remake of the original movie (albeit one with the main characters' genders switched from male to female) and a boring, unintentionally silly and uninvolving mess.

Not only does Omen IV lack the gravitas of the three feature films' religious horror themes, but the facts that it was made on a barebones budget (it shows on screen, too!) and that one director ('Dominique Othenin-Girard) quit in mid-shoot and was replaced by the less-than stellar Jorge Montesi (The Chris Isaak Show, Jake 2.0)  simply show that Omen IV is one of those really bad ideas - such as the creation of AfterMASH and the cancellations of Family Guy - which Fox executives should never be allowed to forget.

With the exception of the use of some fragments from Jerry Goldsmith's Omen scores, there is nothing really of any value in Omen IV.  The rest of the score by composer Jonathan Sheffer - who is more of an arranger/conductor than a John Williams/Danny Elfman wannabe - is in turns silly and unremarkable.

Indeed, "silly and unremarkable" is an apt description for Omen IV: The Awakening.  It lacks the believability infused into Richard Donner's The Omen and its first sequel by Don Taylor, and it is sorely lacking in suspense, real scares or character development.

In closing, gentlemen, I would like to offer this bit of advice: If 20th Century Fox comes calling for Omen V: The Revenge, please, take a pass and try to reboot the Tom Clancy/Jack Ryan franchise instead.  On the big screen, and with none of that weird timeline-messing recasting of Jack Ryan, okay?